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The Programmer Identity Crisis

(hojberg.xyz)
270 points imasl42 | 2 comments | 21 Oct 25 16:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.506s | source
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protontypes ◴[21 Oct 25 17:08 UTC] No.45658345[source]▶
Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
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psunavy03 ◴[21 Oct 25 17:11 UTC] No.45658389[source]▶
That says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.
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gdulli ◴[21 Oct 25 18:40 UTC] No.45659822[source]▶
That's a silly take, just because they existed and were proper grammar before AI slop popularized them doesn't mean they're not statistically likely to indicate slop today, depending on the context.
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psunavy03 ◴[21 Oct 25 19:28 UTC] No.45660496[source]▶
What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are.

It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.

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1. dkersten ◴[22 Oct 25 10:38 UTC] No.45667162[source]▶
It doesn't really matter. Before LLM's, they were relatively rarely seen, after LLM's, they are commonly seen in AI-written text. Its not unreasonable for people to associate them with being AI-written.
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2. int_19h ◴[23 Oct 25 22:03 UTC] No.45687906[source]▶
They weren't "relatively rarely seen". If you have seen a Word document, chances are good that it had em-dashes in it simply because it would often autocorrect to that. In the Apple ecosystem, this sort of autocorrect is provided by the OS itself, so it extends to a lot more content produced.

I'm pretty sure that all the comments about how it was "rarely seen" are because people weren't paying attention to them before in the way they do now.

In any case, to dismiss something as AI slap based solely on this one thing is both lazy and rude, and should be treated as such.